Cisco Cisco Prime Virtual Network Analysis Module (vNAM) 6.1 White Paper

Page 4 

©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

4

The new Cisco vNAM is a purely software-based version of the NAM solution, offering full NAM 

features that can be deployed directly within a hypervisor. Initial support for KVM and ESX hypervisors 

will be followed by support for Hyper–V at a later date. The Cisco vNAM can gather and analyze 

packets via SPAN and ERSPAN, from a Cisco switch, as well as harvest NetFlow from any source. This 

allows organizations to restore visibility inside of virtual compute environments and even to establish 

direct visibility inside some external cloud settings (depending on cloud provider networking control 

options). For example, by installing an instance of vNAM inside select hypervisors around the data 

center, traffic flowing between VMs within those hypervisors (which never crosses a physical wire) can 

be seen/monitored/analyzed. Further, deployment of NAMs for specific monitoring or troubleshooting 

activities becomes much quicker and more flexible, since there are no physical appliances to deploy or 

cabling to install for the vNAM. 
The Cisco NAM has also been substantially enhanced to help recognize and maintain visibility into 

and through various types of virtual network overlay encapsulations. For instance, existing support has 

been expanded to add OTV, VXLAN, FabricPath, GRE, LISP, and others (see example in Figure 1). 

The enhanced NAM automatically recognizes encapsulation protocols and applies de-encapsulation, 

even in nested encapsulation situations such as VXLAN over OTV. With the use of network overlays 

expanding rapidly, these capabilities are essential for revealing the true identity and nature of encapsulated 

traffic, so that activity can be rightfully recognized and actions prioritized during both monitoring and 

troubleshooting activities.

Figure 1: Visibility into OTV:Profiling the traffic across DCI link; identifying the 

Top Talkers and Applications consuming the most bandwidth